Relationships and Entities

One of the many things that excites me about the new Elgg is relationships between entities. In the new codebase it is possible to create any type of relationship between any type of entity.

Entity A is a 'friend' of Entity B
Entity C is a 'topic' of Entity D
Entity F created a 'share' relationship between Entity C and Entity G
and so on.

That in itself is pretty cool as it means we are never constrained by pre-determined relationships, for example, no more friend tables in the database.

This steps up a level when we add metadata to these relationships. In doing so, we can begin to effectively weight the relationship and hopefully use the resultant data to enhance the experience, making sure users are getting the information that is relevant to them.